So Long and Thanks for All the Khapsa

It’s been nothing if not an eventful year. I carried on a long distance relationship for seven months only to have it implode upon that distance being closed. I had wild flings in the wake. I’ve seen France, Budapest (twice), Taiwan and Sri Lanka. I reunited with an old friend whom I haven’t seen in over ten years and met his wonderful family. I survived an entire year living in a strict Islamic theocracy, teaching some of the worst students I am ever likely to encounter anywhere. I’ve made new friends. I’ve picked up the basics of another language. I’ve experienced what it is like to be firmly middle-class, and have made enough money to pay off my student loan, at last. 

And now it’s time to go. 

Despite the adventure it is been, I am very happy to be moving on. I am looking forward to enjoying the liberties of my own country and Japan. But there are things I’m going to miss about Saudi Arabia. I’ll miss the evenings, which depending on the time of year, are either warm or cool, but are always good for walking. I’ll miss the cheap goods and services, and having more than enough money to buy whatever I want. I’ll miss the easy-going good-naturedness of Saudis. I’ll miss meeting people from a variety of ethnic and cultural backgrounds that I usually don’t get to meet in Canada. I’ll miss studying and practicing Arabic. I’ll miss the weekend trips to Jeddah, Yanbu or the Economic City.  Most of all, I’ll miss my friends.

This last month, having the freedom to experience living here without the distraction of work, I think I’ve gotten some real insight into what it means to be Saudi. Although this country is probably the most strictly Theocratic place on Earth, outside of certain parts of Syria and Iraq, let me tell you, it’s only on the face of it. Young people here are just as wild and hungry for experience as young people in other parts of the world. They drink, they do drugs, watch movies and listen to music. They like to party and they have boyfriends and girlfriends. The only difference is that they are covert. It all has to be done carefully, in secret. 

Nor is the piety what you might expect from a county that is, on paper, one hundred per cent Muslim. As far as I can tell most Saudis do not pray five times a day—and some, I am sure, do not pray at all. Like in any country, there are good people there are bad people, and there are every shade of grey. As one might expect, depending on their own religious leanings, piety and quality of character don’t seem to have a direct relationship. There are pious Muslims that are wonderful, lovely people; and there are non-devout Muslims that are also wonderful, lovely people. Similarly, there are both devout and non-devout Muslims who are brutish and nasty.

Western media likes to paint a picture of Muslims in general as violent, irrational, freedom hating people, or at the very least, it focuses entirely on those Muslims that happen to be so. Of course, it’s true that there are these kinds of people all over the world, in every culture, in every religion. Even, as I am loathe to admit, within Buddhism. Of course, whenever a Muslim points out to me that in Myanmar, there are Buddhists, even Buddhist monks murdering Muslims, I am always quick to point out that these cannot be REAL Buddhists: that the first precept, even for lay followers is not to kill. Similarly, when the subject of the Islamic State, comes up in the office, they are always discredited for the same reason: real Muslims do not murder. Verses of the Quran are always cited to support this assertion. 

When crazy people storm into the offices of French cartoonists and shoot everyone inside, they don’t do it because they are “extremists”, they do it because they are crazy. Very, very few people within the Muslim community condone this kind of behaviour. I worked with a guy who, upon our first meeting told me I was going to go to hell for not believing in God and calls non-believers “infidels” behinds their backs. He gets into fights with the other Muslims over small matters of faith, doesn’t get along with anybody, and has threatened violence to several members of the staff. In short, he’s bat-shit crazy, and obsessed with the letter of Islam. But as zealous and mentally unstable as he is, I can’t imagine even him murdering people for his faith. It takes a rare bird indeed.

Saudi Arabia is a country that is changing quickly. Ten years ago people thought that women would never be seen walking around without head scarfs. But I’ve seen in numerous times—in King Abdullah Economic City (owned by Dubai investors), and even in the malls in Jeddah. 

Speaking of his highness, he does not appear to have much more time on this Earth, and his successor is likely to bring in more liberal legislation. Actually, King Abdullah himself has approved legislation that will, for the first time, make tourist visas available in Saudi Arabia. I don’t know, his decision may be motivated by him understanding the need to diversify the Saudi economy more than anything else. And granted: it is already easy to obtain visas for hajj and umrah.  None-the-less, it will open the county up to people of all walks of life, and with them, new perspective and new ideas.

To be perfectly honest, Saudis are in desperate need of a little insight into the way the rest of the world works—especially in the field of education. The quality of education here is shameful. Running a classroom here is a constant battle, and it’s exhausting. Frankly, after a while, you just stop giving a damn. A colleague confided in me today, “I’ve stopped doing all the things I used to try and make this a better place. Now, I do nothing, and nobody has noticed.” I could only nod.  The standards here are shockingly low.

I’m glad for having the experience to teach here, and I’ll be benefiting from the money I made for years, but I think it’s actually made me a worse teacher. Working here has made me complacent and lazy. I got paid very well, but there was zero accountability. Literally none of my students passed this last trimester. I tried. Oh God how I tried. But in the end, the utter incompetence of students who had only gotten to where they are because of cheating, coupled with an out-right refusal to learn on one side, and the incompetence of the administration, who refused to listen to, much less adapt things to instructor feedback made any hope of effectively English next to impossible.   

Which is one very big reason why I have decided to leave and teach in Japan.  I will be teaching adults. Adults who have had a proper education, and actually know how to learn. Gods be praised! Instead of spending classroom time reminding students to put their phones away, get their pens from their lockers, stop chatting while I’m giving instructions et cetera, I’ll be able to teach. I don’t care if I’m taking a fifty per cent pay cut—it’s going to be worth it. Also because I won’t be living in a country that thinks where I put my penis is government business.

So, it’s goodbye sand and palm trees; hello mountains and cherry blossoms. Goodbye camels and sweet dates; hello panda bears and sushi. Goodbye thobes, and shmougs; hello kimonos and baseball caps. Saudi Arabia, it’s been a slice, but it’s time for me to go. So long, and thanks for all the khapsa.

And thanks for all of you who have kept up with my blog this past year. Knowing people have been reading has kept me motivated to write. Doing so has enriched my life, and I hope it has in some way enriched yours.

Peace, Love, and Pizza

Brady  

The Penultimate Post?

T minus six days until lift-off...inshallah.
Boy, am I ready to get out of here. I haven't had a good night of sleep in five days or so. Evidently, my body has decided to protest Saudi Arabia, and is pretending I'm in Canada already. I don't get tired until twelve in the afternoon, and by the time twelve midnight rolls around, I'm no longer tired. Why would I be? That's lunchtime in Vancouver, after all.

I can't fix it with drugs. I went to one pharmacy to ask them for sleeping medication. They gave me antihistamines. Not surprisingly, they didn't help. I went to a second pharmacy, and they gave me actual sleep medication made with Valerian root. I took a double-dose, but no luck. My usual go-to, melatonin, which is available over the counter in every drug-store in Canada, is no where to be found, much less prescribed.

I've been up all night trying to sleep, and too tired during the day to do much of anything. I imagine, this is what purgatory is like.

Come to think of it, this past month has been rather purgatory-like. Since coming back from my final vacation in Budapest, due to a lack of new student admissions, I have been allowed to fulfill the remainder of my contract relaxing at home. I know, poor me, right? The problem, is I'm stuck in Rabigh. Christmas and New Year's came and went. There were no celebrations, no merry-making, and indeed, barely a mention of the holiday at all.

It wasn't that depressing--I have only spent two Christmases at home in the past five years, and even when at home, my family generally doesn't make that big of a deal out it. I went for kebab with my colleague, Dave, one of the few non-Muslims I know in Rabigh. Afterwards, I went home. I probably had tea later with friends. Purgatory.

Indeed, discounting the vacations, that's really been what this year has been like--a big old meh. These days, when trying to go to sleep, I just try to focus on the void. The void is empty, it's big beyond imagining, and incredibly peaceful. But I can never hold my attention on it for long, and I end up laying in bed for eight fucking hours, getting more and more frustrated. I'm not ready for this bland existence. I don't want my life to be meh anymore. I want to have a little color in my life. Even if that leads to more hang-overs and heart-aches, so be it, at least live will have some flavor. Next year, I want to put up a Christmas tree, and later, puke over somebody's balcony. They have Christmas in Japan, right?

I had hoped to be filling these meh days with scuba dives. The one thing I really wanted to achieve before leaving Rabigh was getting my PADI license. Even though a group of us started in November, we have yet to finish, and were I to leave things in the hands the others, I would never get my license. So after much cajoling, I've attempted to get it done without the group. I've met privately with the instructor to write the final exam, and have arranged with him to do my final dives this Thursday and Friday--my final two days in the country. I've been pushing for this for months, and if it actually get's done, it's going to be right on the wire.

Similarly, I feel obliged to harass HR for my plane ticket home. After much haranguing, I have obtained my final exit visa, and form for my final payment remittance...but I've got less than a week left in the country, and still no ticket. It's imperative that I acquire it on time as my passport expires only a few days after my end of contract date and every day that I'm stuck here, in purgatory, is another day I won't be able to spend with friends and family before shipping off to Japan in February.

Give me heaven, or give me hell, just get me out of here, Allah.

A Saudi Picnic

These past couple of weeks have predictably making me stir crazy. I've been spending too much time at home and too much time playing video games. Despite having made a schedule produced explicitly to keep me in good health mental, physically and emotionally, I really needed to get out of Rabigh for a while. Thus it came as a boon when a coworker suggested that we hold a picnic at a place he knows, just out of town.
In three cars a group of about ten of us made our way out to Mathew's mysterious campground. In the forty minutes or so it took to get there, I was astounded by the diversity of the landscape--no really! Here it was flat and sandy, then covered with shrubs, then it was hilly, then covered in boulders with little trees popping up here and there. Eventually, we ended up in a a small valley, with a shallow (but far-reaching) lake. It was a bona-fide  desert oasis. There were flocks of goats, and even camels! We had our picnic under a copse of palm trees. 

Some years ago, I read the short novel, Ismael, in which the author suggests that this part of the world was once covered in lush greenery, and that it is now barren because of man's unsustainable habits. The trip was a reminder that things really do grow in Arabia, especially in this western region--in fact tenaciously. I found myself wondering just how correct the author of Ishmael really was.

I mean, once thing is for sure: Arabia was once covered in vegetation, and inhabited by a massive amount of wildlife. We know this because of the enormous subterranean seas of oil. The only question is if there weren't endless herds of goats stripping the landscape of plant life, would the peninsula look much different?

I'm guessing it would. As the colleague who organized the trip mentioned, there used to be lions here, but the natives killed them all off. So, if there are no predators, even if there were herds of goats, sheep, camels, or whatever that weren't counted as livestock, they would not linger in any given place. Instead of stripping the ground of vegetation, they would eats some, then move on, propelled forward by predators, spreading seeds, and fertilizing the ground as they go.

Modern man has gone a step further. A few meters from where we sat to have our picnic, one could find, here and there, among the hundreds of discarded water bottles, shot-gun shells, and the corpses of massive hawks. Clearly not shot for food, as their entire corpses were intact--but purely for the fun of it. Sometimes I think Saudis have a deep seeded resentment for all living things and are doing all they can to erase life in the peninsula altogether.

None the less, it was a nice place to picnic. I was excited to see camels so close to our picnic site, and got quite close to one in order to take its picture. Evidently, it became very curious of me as it began walking towards me then following me back to the picnic site. I was a little alarmed, until one of my colleagues approached and petted the animal. It was docile, but decided to turn away when it got closer to the group of us. 

When the sun began to set, a few of us decided to hike around the surrounding area awhile. The ground was soft and muddy for several meters where the water had recently receded. I avoided the soft ground by walking on an elevated ridge, and then hiking up one side of the valley. There was a plateau on top, and I was amazed to see that around the jagged rocks thereupon, spouted beautiful, bright green grass. The view was really nice. I could see the water stretch onwards as far as the eye could see towards the north.

We left shortly after I came down from the plateau.  The excursion was brief, but pleasant, and for a while Arabia didn't seem like such an inhospitable environment. It was a welcome break.